Quote

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

Ken Burns

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ken Burns
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 29
Actor
Cinematographer
Film Director
Film Producer
Manufacturer
Producer
Screenwriter
Brooklyn
New York
Kenneth Lauren Burns
Kenneth L. Burns
Kenneth Burns
Artist
Someone
Lifes
Stills
Landscapes
Still
Filmmaker
Might
Landscape
Work
Chosen
Way
Choose
History

More quotes by Ken Burns

Image
Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.
Ken Burns
Image
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
Ken Burns
Image
The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.
Ken Burns
Image
We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.
Ken Burns
Image
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
Ken Burns
Image
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.
Ken Burns
Image
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Ken Burns
Image
In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
Ken Burns
Image
Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.
Ken Burns
Image
I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.
Ken Burns
Image
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
Ken Burns
Image
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.
Ken Burns
Image
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
Ken Burns
Image
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
Ken Burns
Image
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Ken Burns
Image
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
Ken Burns
Image
I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
Ken Burns
Image
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken Burns
Image
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
Ken Burns
Image
In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
Ken Burns